# Saving Lives with high efficiency Drone Nerds

- Event: NestGen ’22
- Published: March 3, 2022
- Length: 39:04
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/JEX9tOeB0fM/

> The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's
> captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms.

## About this session

Discover how public safety teams are doing more with less thanks to the live coverage and superfast response that autonomous drones provide.

## Transcript

**[0:12]** hi everyone this is uh hutchel director of business development at FlytBase hope you are enjoying the nation and all the sessions that we have been conducting for you the next event is focused on drones in public safety as we know public safety teams have been prominently using drones for the first response drones have become crucial part of emergency response but operations today still require first responder to drive to a particular location take out the drone from the case prepare for the takeoff and finally launch it time is really critical component in these operations every second is important how can these operations become efficient how can we leverage automated drone inbox technology to reach there what is the future of drones in public safety to help us understand this better we have none other than jeremy schneiderman the ceo and co-founder of drone nerds north america is a leading enterprise and consumer drone solution provider and distributor so I would like to quickly welcome jeremy

**[1:13]** uh to the session before I move on to jeremy let me just do a quick introduction as well as uh walk through a few housekeeping roles so jeremy as we know is a ceo co-founder drone nuts and drone nuts was established in 2014. roadnuts focuses on ensuring that its customers have the right uav solutions for the unique operation needs with its proprietary always flying program dronus provides reliability and assurance for enterprise implementations across industry verticals including public safety government agriculture construction energy inspections and more for more information you can go to enterprise.growners.com welcome jeremy good afternoon everybody my name is jeremy schneiderman I am the ceo and one of the co-founders of drone nerds looking forward to talking to you guys today about how we are changing the way public safety is using technology today to better enhance their programs I like my pro my programs to be highly interactive

**[2:16]** so I'm all about you know interrupting and asking your questions I know as presentations go through sometimes waiting to the very end you may forget that question so please uh you know post your questions to the to the chat we have a moderator here that will be happy to ask me them and I'll be happy to answer them to give you a quick background about drone nerds uh drone nerds we are a team of uh 65 droners what we call we're based here primarily in south florida but we do have team members across the united states and into latin america you know our goal is delivering successful drone programs across major verticals and one of the major verticals that we've had a lot of success in is in public safety we we develop large-scale programs and we do our best to try to take all the pains out of a program to have a successful mission at the end of the day so today we're going to talk about drones and public safety who's using them why and how they've become so intricate in different uh public safety systems you know based

**[3:20]** on some early 2020 studies over 1500 public safety agencies are using drones in their programs today we believe these agencies are early adopters uh we we know that there's over 15 000 different police agencies here in the united states and we believe eventually every single one of those agencies will have a drone program of some size many departments today are just starting to evaluate the technology and see how they can be a benefit in their program some of the leading states today that have large larger programs is california texas florida which we've had our hand in developing these programs from drone number one to you know in some of these public safety offices were well over 200 drones uh in their departments and we're seeing some great uses which we're going to talk about today you know today you know public safety uh offices are dealing with many different types of challenges um obviously the biggest one for them is safety right how do

**[4:24]** they keep their officers out of harm's way how do they keep their firefighters out of harm's way you know if we can solve this need and potentially save a life there'd be nothing more rewarding for me and any of the people that are involved in our organization um so we look today at what are the biggest risks right uh dangerous situations really the unknown and time you know many times in in public safety missions they're dealt with limited time they arrive on scene there's a hostage situation time is not on their side then there's less obvious ones just crime scene investigation how they're doing it today it's time consuming end result sometimes causes extra traffic that doesn't need to be there we have drones and solutions today that we're going to talk about that are going to help in all of these areas today we talk about how drones can aid in public safety you know one of the main things aside from safety is understanding situational awareness

**[5:30]** being able to get that information as quick as possible can help make informed decisions that could ultimately save some lives traditionally ground teams would have to contend with blind spots and would be exposed to unnecessary risks in their day-to-day job utilizing the drone technology that we're going to discuss today today we can quickly deploy drones on scene gain immediate aerial insight we could hover over unfolding missions live stream directly to the command center so the command commanding officer can make those decisions right away this is information that wasn't available you know going you know prior to us getting into this drone industry using this information you can synchronize teams you can eliminate some of that uncertainty and you could allow you know the the commanding offer to make those decisions with confidence we do this today with the technology that we're going to show uh one is the main thing we're going to be able to provide overwatch

**[6:30]** we're going to be able to use visuals and and prevent our officers from being in harm's way we utilize different sensors on these platforms such as uh thermal imaging this allows us to have eyes in the dark we're able to find people where we normally wouldn't be able to see them unless we were within five or ten feet from them in you know dense uh environments again with situational awareness we could provide instant real-time maps and send it to a command center this is literally within five minutes of arriving on scene I could have a 3d map of that scene live that information is absolutely invaluable again it goes back to how do we keep our officers out of harm's way so we're going to talk about some really exciting technology today that's accomplishing this

**[7:33]** you know some of the benefits that drones offer are very obvious uh some of them not so much when it comes to public safety you know again you know safety is the main thing um and we do this by having additional eyes in the sky and have advantage points that either the bad guy doesn't have or we just don't have that that cue when we first arrive on scene speed you know we I talked briefly about you know time is of the essence with the solutions we're going to talk about today we can deploy a fleet of drones in a matter of minutes and from those drones we're getting that actionable data in the field instantly we can cover a large amount of of space quickly um where we would if we were in a search and rescue environment you know we'd have to get a bunch of people lined up walk through a forest with a drone I could have a drone that's covering 25 000 acres in in less than an hour with highly uh intelligent sensors we're going to talk about a solution today that has an 18-mile range

**[8:36]** prior to this technology you'd have to use a helicopter very expensive time consuming and sometimes you couldn't fly as close as the drones could to cover that area today we can capture data better than ever before and do this efficiently and more cost effectively than with the tools of yesterday we're going to cover two main areas in our presentation we're going to talk about law enforcement and firefighters and how the technology is being used today you know some of the main areas that we use them for surveillance you know we talked about one solution it can fly up to three hours it could support multiple different payloads from thermal sensors to 200x zoom capability we utilize ai today we have license plate recognition we're able to identify and track objects or people intelligently with a drone ultimately the goal is to be to provide overwatch

**[9:39]** and situational awareness for crowd control we're able to use our high-powered microphones to talk to the crowd in a hostile environment in a hostile situation we're also if we're able in a search and rescue environment and we we have a drone that's two miles out in the forest and we identify you know somebody that might be lost we can now talk to them and let them know help is on the way that can be very reassuring to somebody that's in that situation we could use drones to get an insight to understand traffic patterns we could reroute the traffic after an incident in a more effective way eliminating extra traffic that doesn't need to be there for crime scene investigation we could do accident recreation with the right hardware sensors and software we could create 3d models with m centimeter accuracy either using rgb cameras or lidar technology this accident recreation can be done in a matter of minutes with better data than has ever been able to be

**[10:42]** captured for fire rescue they have a different flight mission you know we are also trying to get safety first uh traditionally in the past if there was a fire in a urban environment you'd arrive on scene there could be smoke and obstacles that can make it a challenge to determine the scope of the fire and really what its threat is this limits the ground perspectives on that fire and it can hinder their ability to manage the fire the most efficiently post-incident it can be very hazardous and costly to survey and document that damage we can do this efficiently I mean determine the spread using the technology with drone solutions we're able to fly over the buildings we can fly through obstacles with thermal sensors we can see through the smoke and help prioritize our targets all while doing this we can stream live video back to the command center align the

**[11:45]** teams and elim eliminate all that of that ins uncertainty we're able to leverage high resolution cameras to remotely monitor some of the threats and document this damage for future analysis again the data that we get today is far superior than the data that we were getting yesterday when dealing with forest fires over a large terrain you know we're dealing with complex terrain which makes it almost sometimes impossible to get to the spot that we need immediately from the ground it's going to be difficult to quickly determine the scope of the fire and a prioritized targets without drones with drones we can bypass obstacles we can quickly scout high-risk forested regions from above we could fly above the tree line and quickly see the scope of the fire and establish fire lines and fire breaks additionally with an eye in the sky incident commanders can determine where to

**[12:46]** deploy their assets again it's about speed and time and being able to deploy these drone solutions rapidly we can be much more effective effective when dealing with this type of situation so jeremy we did have an interesting question come up around in which ways are today's search and rescue drones autonomous and how could full autonomy help in search of search and rescue it's a great question so based on initially you fly out and we can go out to a field and fly and map that that field once we know the situation and where the objects or the hot spots are we can then create automated flights using the flight software so the the flight themselves will be automated utilizing some of the technology we're going to talk about later where we have a drone in the box that's changing the batteries we can create this mission and literally 24 hours a day had the flights going on to be able to address that situation

**[13:51]** and then one more do you think the drone swarm can be used effectively for search and rescue and with the increase in cloud computing and ai do you see the drones used in prevention of crime um for example a suspicious vehicle parked in a vacant parking lot for a long duration yeah great questions going back to the first question the first part of this question could you repeat the first part again yes do you think the drone swarm can be used effectively for search and rescue absolutely if you think about it if I could have one drone covering you know a certain size of area or having a swarm of drones I could again be quicker more efficient and cover a lot more area whether it be firefighting or it be public safety in a you know in a situation where a lot of area needs to be covered and the second part of that question was do you see drones used in prevention of

**[14:52]** crime just in terms of things like a suspicious vehicle parked in a vacant parking lot for a long duration sure so if we can automate a lot of this and have a drone where it's constantly flying returns home battery is checked goes back up in the air we can monitor those types of situations effectively and almost automatically so when talking about natural disasters and search and rescue we talked about the sensors that some of these have in the payloads and the the the flight time that these allow this allows us to do mapping uh and 3d modeling uh post a disaster or even pre a disaster to understand what we're looking at as far as buildings and infrastructure utilizing the drone technology we're able to create 3d maps with centimeter accuracy for search and rescue again we can use thermal sensors with temperature alarms we can cover many square miles and be alerted if an object

**[15:55]** is over a certain degree so in a case of search and rescue if we're looking for a person that's missing in a forest in the middle of the winter we set that temperature reading anything over 80 degrees or 70 degrees whatever that number is we can fly a drone that's going to cover many miles of forest and anytime it sees something that's over that degree we're going to get alarmed there's nothing more efficient than that we talked about some of the solutions that drone can provide but what I want to really do is talk about some of the hardware that makes this all work we're going to talk about some of the platforms and then we'll get into the hardware itself the sensors themselves the workhorse today across a lot of public safety agencies is the DJI matrice 300. supports up to three different payloads I can run an rgb camera a you know a

**[16:55]** standard uh camera as well as a thermal camera and then have a third sensor up on the top we use uh sensors that methane detectors if there's a gas leak you know you have a building that collapsed and we got to check to make sure it's safe before we send people into it we can attach it to this payload this one is weatherproof ip rated and has almost an hour of fly time based on the different payload if we're looking for something a little bit more compact that I believe eventually a drone like this will be in every single police officer's car this drone allows 48 megapixel visual camera you're able to do mapping it has rtk capabilities which is going to allow us to do precision modeling again thermal imaging so this is really can cover search and rescue situational awareness 3d model recreation all in a fold up drone that fits in the back of a backpack

**[18:00]** I also want to add these drones all have avoiding avoidance technology so not only is it providing safety for police officers you're able to use them safely without you know damaging other people's equipment when we start to look for a solution that's going to be able to have a long range capability for overwatch over large areas we start to look into some of our fixed wing solutions so this is a fixed-wing vertical takeoff it's going to take off vertically the propellers are going to switch and it's going to start to to fly forward this particular unit has up to 120 minutes of fly time there's another model that they have is a three hour flight time 67 miles per hour uh almost an 18 mile range where you're going to get that live video transmission all while you're flying up to 18 miles amazing technology what's amazing with this solution it's got multiple diff multiple payloads

**[19:02]** it's got a dual sensor and a triple sensor the dual sensor is going to give you rgb and zoom 20x optical zoom on the triple sensor you're going to get that same capability and then we're going to add in thermal technology with radiometric capabilities this particular craft is integrated with ai where we can do that license plate recognition or that object following which is you know again going back to that question about automation I can put this into a into an automatic flight as soon as I lock into an object I don't need to have my pilot following that object the drone itself is going to follow that wherever it goes again up to almost three hours of fly time this particular drone was used recently in a very high profile case here in florida we had a high profile person of interest that was missing on the west coast of florida for murder

**[20:03]** the local sheriff's office who has one of these dragon fish used it to surveil up to 25 000 square parcel of area we were looking at underwater zones that were in excess and it was inaccessible terrain to do by by car by foot by using the drone the fbi and the sheriff's office were able to find personal belongings that belong to the suspect and eventually were able to find that person again previously we'd have to have a fleet of helicopters out there to do this job which can be one unaffordable for some of these small local agencies and also very time consuming any questions at this point there are some questions that I think we should address a little bit okay great again highly interactive if you have some questions post them to the chat we will get to them actually while we're on the dragon fish one question was is there a battery swapping solution for the dragon fish today or are we currently manual

**[21:08]** swapping today we are currently manual swapping um in the case of this sheriff's office they have multiple crafts so if you think about it between two crafts you can have six hours of flight time while that one is down is you can have that one charging by the time the other one is is coming out of service you can put the other one back up so you could almost have perpetual flights using two of these the parrot anafi usa is a very similar as far as specs as the mavic 2 enterprise advance today we're starting to see some demand for some ndaa compliant and blue uas trusted drones the paradigma usa as well as the para nanafi gov are both on that blue uas list again thermal technology rgb and zoom in a pocket in a foldable backpack size solution

**[22:09]** one of the most exciting products that we've seen this year is the brink lemur s this was designed specifically for swat teams and public safety to fly in gps denied environments so if we have and unfortunately we have these school shootings where sometimes we don't know where that person is inside of the school traditionally with with the drones they fly using gps technology to make it easy to fly the brink lemur s was designed using lidar technology to help fly within a gps denied environment this drone can break through windows it can open doors it's got radio repeating boxes that it can drop throughout a building so it could have continuous communication with the team that's going to be on the outside and on top of that is two-way communication so if we're able to identify a hostile person within you know a place before sending in swat team this drone

**[23:12]** can literally save lives 30 minutes of fly time and almost 10 hours of perch time and what I mean by perch time we could fly it into a room if we are now in a in a hostage negotiation situation we we perch this and now we can talk through the drone and hopefully alleviate the situation it also has a dropper so if if that person is asking for a pack of cigarettes we can now fly this drone in drop them the cigarettes again without putting any of the police force in harm's way not only are we able to not put police people in harm's way we're able to use this in gps tonight environment unfortunately we had that condo collapse here in south florida and when that did collapse we were using it for certain or their teams were using it for search and rescue there were a lot of areas that we couldn't send people in by foot because it was an unstable

**[24:13]** environment we couldn't put other people at risk but using the brake limiter s we were able to fly into these tight-knit you know this drone is only about a foot by a foot we were able to fly this into these crevices and look for people and be able to get situational awareness that we weren't able to get before without putting people's lives in danger the teal golden eagle is another one of the blue uas this was designed for government but is now being reported reused and redesigned for public safety again integrated thermal camera daylight camera can be fixed out in the field so if something happens typically when a drone goes out of service has to get sent into our service center it's out of commission for a little bit the way that tl has designed this platform it's one screwdriver can change almost all the parts on the drone in fact when they ship it they give you replacement arms replacement prop so if you're out on the field again time is of the

**[25:16]** essence if they do have some type of incidence they can quickly fix it in the field and get the drone back up and deployed all of these drones run you know anywhere from 30 minutes to up to three to four hours using the fixed wing technology is getting better day by day the products that we're talking about today will be the old products of tomorrow but really what makes the those products so game changing it's the sensors on them that create that actionable data that either save lives create 3d orthomosaics of the you know the incident they are really the key to making a drone program successful we're going to talk about a bunch of different sensors that are used across all different types of public safety agencies and these most of these sensors that we're talking about are going to integrate into the matrice 300 some of them are specific to the platforms that we discussed earlier

**[26:19]** before we move on to the sensors are there any hardware questions that we could cover we do have a hardware question just around which hardware would you recommend for creating drone swarms it's really going to depend on the size of the space um small and portable is quickly deployed deployable for public safety uh so we like any of the ones that are foldable puck you know and and small because those are going to be the ones that we can rapidly deploy easily carry in the back of a cruiser and get them out you know up into the air any additional great so moving on to these sensors we have the the DJI zenmuse h20 this is a rgb camera with a 200 max zoom very efficient for mapping very efficient for

**[27:19]** just observational awareness um and a very high resolution similar to the h20 we have the h20t very similar specs but this is the one that's going to have that that radiometric thermal capabilities both of those sensors are ip rated so we can fly them in harsh conditions this is the one that's going to have that temperature reading to and you can set the alarm based on whatever degree that you want when we talk about mapping and creating those 3d models the DJI zenmuse l1 is a lidar sensor this is going to also have excuse me 20 megapixel cmos sensor and is also ip rated uh with this sensor and the DJI tara software we can create centimeter-grade 3d orthomosaic maps of any scene sometimes we can't predict uh what environment uh public safety is

**[28:19]** going to have to fly in with the emesis uh this is a lidar solution that also has some base technology that allows us to fly DJI matrice drone in gps denied environments uh we could fly them you know inside stadiums tunnels throughout mines um so you're getting the benefit of the slam technology to be able to fly in these types of environments but you're also getting that same lidar technology to create 3d color mapping color maps another sensor that isn't your typical photo sensor but is a loudspeaker that we integrate into the matrice 300 this has a four mile range again this is a way we can you do crowd control or talk to either uh somebody that's lost or if we have a hostage situation and we need to talk to that person from from afar we're able to do that using this loudspeaker and drones today we're starting to see a lot of different uh manufacturers design

**[29:20]** accessories that complement the drone hardware and drone sensors to make drone programs more efficient one of the ones that was uh introduced very early on was a tether system think of a long extension cord to the bottom of a drone so that we could have a drone sit up in the air in a persistent environment for real really endless time as long as you have a power source going into the tether this is great for surveilling you know small areas if we have an accident we could put a drone up and and do it for traffic monitoring but there are limitations on this you are connected to a tether 300 foot tether so we can only go you know as long as far as that cable is going to allow us a product that we introduced this year is the hextronics global advanced docking station this is like a tether but on steroids this is a drone-in-the-box solution that allows the drone to land in the box and

**[30:24]** this changes the battery automatically on top of that it's layered in with automated software to do automated missions endless so we do have a question here around what does the future look like in terms of deploying these drone stations across various locations and talk about a little bit where we are right now and how far are we from advancements in the future so today you know it goes back to one of my earlier slides you know today there's about 1500 public safety agencies using drones based on a study from last year we know there's 15 000 public safety offices today we also believe you know it's very early in drone technology and regulations um here in the united states you know there's there's things that we need regulatory to happen in order for these to really scale to the level that we believe that

**[31:25]** they're going to be in the future I personally believe in the future every police department will have a drone program of some degree I also believe that we'll have these automated docking stations we should have one at almost every you know public safety office in the united states why do we need to deploy a police officer to every situation if I can click a button and have a drone go there and be those eye in the sky automatically not put people's lives in danger immediately get situational awareness prior to us sending the public safety officers to that to that area there's no reason why this won't happen in the future as long as we get the regulations behind us but until we have a drone solution box at every public safety office we have other solutions to fill that gap so hextronix has the hex truck so we take that same drone in the box solution that they've designed and now we've created an

**[32:28]** installation into the back of a picture pickup truck so that we can drive this truck to a scene deploy the drone immediately situational awareness we're sending the video feed back to a commander station or quite frankly anywhere in the united states uh so now we have you know commanders seeing in real time what's happening on a local environment it's amazing technology so we've seen but before we move into kind of what the drone nerds does for public safety are there any other additional questions on the sensors or hardware we do have a couple uh so here we have one you talked mostly about passive sensing what is the future for precision delivery of more active payloads like fire suppressant spill control epi pens etc so fire control we're doing today we have drones that can drop uh fire suppressants uh today so that that's happening now delivery uh of you know medic medical supplies

**[33:34]** you know it's gonna go back to regulations beyond visual line of sight today we can deliver as long as it's within line of sight and we have solutions today that do that we have delivery box we have drop-in mechanisms but really on a large scale once we have that beyond visual line of sight which I believe is the next major boom in our space once that once that passes we'll be able to deploy a lot more solutions that are kind of in limbo today because of regulations but I do believe we'll have a lot more active payloads than passive payloads in the future and then for natural disasters like earthquakes do you think a group of ground drones and aerial drones can provide the safe path for ground teams to enter the affected area absolutely yeah and kind of just as you talked about as well as deliver food medicine et cetera where health is yet to reach absolutely it's all about speed efficiently efficiency and safe safety

**[34:36]** with a drone swarm and the right technology of drone hardware and sensors the solutions can be rapidly deployed efficiently and safely so how does drone nerds support public safety what are we start what are we seeing today um in in the environment you know we go into with a little bit of a different approach you know we're looking to solve we look to take all the pains out of a drone program and we do this by making sure that we're selecting the right solution based on what we believe their mission is going to be we help define that mission then we go in and we we do extensive trainer we can train the trainer or we can go into a department and train all of the individual pilots we help with compliance because ultimately for programs to be successful they need to be compliant not only for the FAA but the internal compliance within an organization so we lay out fleet management software that that assures you know that these things are happening and these checklists are occurring when pilots are flying

**[35:39]** and ultimately a drone needs to be flying so we have a service and repair part of our business that in the case of you know a drone you know that becomes inoperable crashes they send it to our service center and we're able to get them back up and flying and we pride ourselves on what we call our always flying program we understand ultimately time is of the essence a drone always need to be needs to be operational so for some of our public safety offices we'll deploy what we call our hot swap fleet so if if they have an incident that they can't fix or repair in the field they call us we overnight a drone tomorrow they're operational and they're flying and we'll take the other one back put it into our hots we'll fix it repair it and put it back into the hot top fleet so that these drones and these programs are completely successful really appreciate everybody's time here to answer any questions for you today let me know care if there's any additional questions to cover

**[36:41]** and give me just a moment as I read through the chat we've got some great feedback about how the hex truck looks super cool and we tend to agree we do we believe that's going to be a real game changer for a lot of these public safety offices the technology is mind-boggling when you see it in action absolutely I don't see any additional oh I think we actually just had one pop up here and no unfortunately I can't see that question so it looks like we we are wrapping up thank you jeremy we really appreciate this time well thank you everybody for attending we uh we certainly enjoyed the time with you can you go to the last slide just so they can get our contact information absolutely perfect so if anybody has any additional questions that pop up or have some questions on how to scale a program feel free to reach out to us our number's up on

**[37:43]** the screen again my name is jeremy schneiderman I'm always available feel free to reach out to this number ask for me but we have a an amazing set of uh drone nerds here that uh consistent in any type of program thank you very much for the time thank you jeremy thanks for the session this was really insightful we went through each and every components that are required for public safety officials to now move to first start the drone operations and move to a fully automated operations so I think this was really beneficial we had a lot of questions so feel free uh people to go head back to the booth that roanoke has and you can chat with the team there to even get more further insights or once you get answers to your questions ah with that uh we would now be closing the session uh for the attendees now we are having a networking session after this so feel free to join that and then we'll be having the last uh uh tracks for the sessions that we're going to close for the day so if you

**[38:46]** head to the reception area and you'd be able to uh join the networking sessions as well as the next set of sessions thank you thank you very much everybody okay thank you bye